For a time long past its accuracy, I thought of myself as a girl. The word permeates the culture in a way that made this feel simple: girls who are sad and cool and dragon-tattooed, girls gone and on fire and dead. It wasn’t purposeful, or in any way reflective of what I wanted; in fact as a kid I hated being a girl, the idea that my Episcopalian school would make me wear a skirt, counting my kin on morning cartoons and always coming up short, the creeping expectations, nearer by the year, which I could not articulate but resented as deeply as I knew I would fail. Mostly I just didn’t feel far enough from my girl-self: I looked at myself and saw still the same flickering inconstant heart, stumbling through barely avoided disaster on shaky legs, that had sent me crying into the third-floor bathroom at seventeen. Woman, if anything, was a political class. I experienced oppression as a woman; I experienced my life as a girl.
Woman, even with the prestigious accompaniment, is the most classically Kesha song on the album. That spoken cut at the beginning alone—her laughter, Okay, shut up! barked out with zest in response to an injunction towards seriousness—is a rare moment on Rainbow that wouldn’t sound out of place on her previous records, maybe after the track where she proclaimed herself sick of being so serious, or before the one where she implored dudes to just stop talking. The girls in the front could be the same friends we last saw all pretty and plastered; the boys who can’t buy her love have been trying the same sleazy tactics since 2011. Kesha has never needed to be held by a man; she’s always done what she wants.
But Woman isn’t the spitball-firing battle of the sexes epitomized in Blah Blah Blah, or even the smirking class warfare of Sleazy. When Kesha sings I’m a motherfucking woman, she doesn’t mean as opposed to a man. Woman, here, it’s about being grown; it’s about standing sure on your own two feet. It means owning your power, not softening your statements with false uncertainty or disguising your best ideas as tossed-off jokes. It’s not about adopting the arrogance or aggression of men; it’s about knowing who you are and asserting your selfhood without apology.
It’s amazing how difficult this can be when you’ve been trained to see your personhood as an imposition on the world. The first time I told a man I had just met not to touch me—not to fuck off, not to get the hell out of my face, not that he was disgusting and wasting my time, just not to touch me, a stranger—my entire body quavered in some automatic self-recrimination. The second time was easier. Your personal power is like a gas: it fills the space you give it. The more you make room for it, the more freely it expands. It brings strength, but also joy. And it is a serious task, but it’s also, like, not. Listen to the delightful verse where Kesha dissolves helplessly into giddy laughter; watch her in the video, dancing around in a sequined gold cape; try it yourself, throwing middle fingers up to the sky as you sing along, biting into both the earnest celebration and the earthbound vulgarity: I’m a motherfucker!
In the essay Kesha wrote about this song, I wish she hadn’t casually equated womanhood with fertility, a formation with deep patriarchal roots that also excludes a large number of women. But there’s something to be said for cultivating awe for the things your body can do. Tasting blackberries, dancing, booting up consciousness, sex, trying if sometimes misguidedly to keep me safe, sleep, the coordinated dispersion of blood; a while ago I spent a day sleeping off a cold and I emerged with unfamiliar appreciation for the thing inside my skin, its microbiotic efficiencies. In the same essay Kesha wrote:
A huge turning point for me was my recent tour with my band, The Creepies. On that tour, we did away with many of the big pop gimmicks: no dancers, no screens, no backing vocalists, no backing tracks - it was just my band and I letting it all out onstage. Even though I didn’t have new music out in the world I was sick of waiting around, and I had a lot of raw crazy energy and wanted to reconnect with my fans. It was a sink-or-swim situation - it was either me sing my ass off or sound like shit, because it was just me singing. No safety net, nothing to help out or distract from anything if I hit a fucked up note. It put the pressure on me in a good way. I had to rise to the occasion and take control of my voice and in the process I gained a lot of confidence in my vocal ability I’ve never had before. When I went back to finish recording “Rainbow,” I had a whole new confidence in my voice because I had just gone on an entire tour and carried the whole thing with that voice.
If there is one experience that’s as close to universal among women as it can get, it might be this: believing in your marrow that the body that you have is a body that is wrong. That it is somehow insufficient or incorrect for what it needs to do, which is nothing more or less than being yours for life. We’re all smart people here, so I don’t have to explain how it is that I can love pop gimmicks and love this too: Kesha sharing how she walked into fear and discovered what exactly it was her body, her voice, her physical self, could do. The music she could create, when she needed to believe she could. When she gave herself no choice but to try to become the best version of herself. To have the audacity to believe in your capacity for growth, and the bravery to create the conditions in which it must happen—to dare to believe that you are enough—that’s being a motherfucking woman.
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